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Sunday 10 May 2009

Sampling Sheffield

A belated and huge thank you to the Embroiderers' Guild for inviting us to Sheffield to speak at their annual conference. Presentating to a packed auditorium of over 100 passionate embroiderers, was nerve-racking but I have to say it was very well received and there was interesting discussion during and afterwards, about collaboration, the blues and british trad jazz, slow verses fast, hand and digital - which is the one thing I was most hoping for. It was a fun, enlightening, moving and inspiring day. Yusra, Jason, Jackie and I all loved it.

As part of the day we held a workshop exploring the connection between stitched samplers and sound - the aim being to create a sound piece using text, voice, pattern and sampling inspired by embroidered samplers. Here is the resulting sound piece created live as we went along. All the sounds you hear - the voices, baselines, drum beats etc are created from either a drawn pattern entered into Reaktor, or from the voices of the embroiderers - poems, noises and words - then sampled, looped, distorted, reversed etc in Ableton Live.

A collective and improvised piece: 90 minutes, 30 embroiderers, pens, paper, imagination, reflection, humour and open minds. Let us know what you think.

And of course a huge thank you to all the participants - Claire, Nicola, Antonia, Jenny, Jacqueline, Kate, Annette, Barbara, Marie, Eveleen, Fiona, Margaret, Heather, Liz, Jo, Maureen, Muriel, Dora and Sarah. Apologies to all of those whose name I haven't got..please let me know. Your CDs are in the post!

1 comment:

Nickie said...

Have been looking forward to seeing your posting - it was an enlightening day

thank you, Nick